Category: blogging

Useful links: Widgets, HTML5 & help me with Chrome

Keep WordPress Widgets from Appearing on Particular Pages from KnowIT is a terrific explanation of how to pick and choose which pages you want WordPress widgets to appear on.

HTML5 and CSS3 Readiness by Paul Irish and Divya Manian shows a display you can manipulate of HTML5 elements and which browsers already support them. Chrome and Safari 4 have almost complete implementation of HTML5, moving out toward various versions of IE, with very limited support. In addition to running your mouse around the information, you can also resize the display by dragging, because the page is done in HTML5.

Speaking of Chrome, I’ve tried several times to install it on my Mac (OS 10.5.8) and it won’t open. I keep getting errors. Anybody have any ideas what my problem might be?

Useful links: CO to Facebook, BlogPaws

CO to State Facebook Users: “Shut. Down. EVERYTHING.” at eduGURU takes an in depth look at what happened in Colorado with regard to the Facebook Terms of Service. The article also examines similar statements in the TOS information from sites like MySpace and YouTube. You might not live in Colorado, but this may affect you.

Did you know there’s a convention for pet bloggers? Yep. It’s called BlogPaws and it’s real.

Tip: HTML5 markup for blog posts

Writing about HTML5 while it is still in a state of flux is like standing upright on a water bed while shooting a carnival rifle at a moving row of ducks. What I’m about to tell you is based on the HTML 5 working draft dated 4 March 2010.

In HTML5 terms, the <article> element is considered sectioning content, as is the <section> element. Authors are encouraged to use the article element instead of the section element when it would make sense to syndicate the contents of the element. A blog post, therefore, makes the most semantic sense to me when it is marked up as an <article> element. It can be syndicated as a unit.

An <article> element can include a <header> element, which could contain  <h1> through <h6> elements marking up things like the article title, author’s name, publication dates, and other material that makes sense. Within a <header> element, you can nest an optional <hgroup> element, which is header group, or a related group of elements within a <header>. In HTML5, each <article> can have its own <header>.

An <article> element can include a <footer> element. The <footer> could contain links to comments, various permalinks, options to share the post on Twitter or Facebook or StumbleUpon, an hCard, or other material relevant to the article content. In HTML5, each <article> can have its own <footer>.

Based on that background information, here’s sample markup for one way to format a blog post with HTML5. I suggest a few ways to add content, but there are many more ways to deal with this. For example, you might want the pubdate in the footer.

<article>
<header>
<a href="#" rel="bookmark" title="post title"><h1>Article title</h1></a>
<h2>Author's name</h2>
<p>Published <time pubdate datetime="2010-03-26T18:26-07:00"></time>.</p>
</header>
<p>A lot of great article content.</p>
<footer>
Footer info here: comment links, whatever.
</footer>
</article>

What response do you want to your blog posts?

What do you do when you read a great blog post? Do you comment, do you tweet a link, do you stumble it or bookmark it somewhere like delicious?

I find it depends. Sometimes I really enjoy a post but don’t comment. Instead I do something to support the blogger like tweet or stumble. Sometimes I really enjoy a post, want to comment with my thoughts on the topic, and don’t bother to tweet or stumble.

And, sometimes, I wonder what the blogger would most like his or her readers to do.

I think it’s safe to say that the bloggers who are trying to make a living off advertising income want the traffic driving tweet or stumble or digg.

Other bloggers might want the engagement, the conversation, and not care at all about traffic.

Then there are bloggers like me, who appreciate every comment, tweet, and stumble.  I’m never sure anyone is reading.  Any sort of response gives me a bit of feedback that lets me know at least someone read a post.

I asked this question on Twitter. A couple of people shared their thoughts. Elaine Nelson who is @epersonae, said this and added this and wrapped up with a final thought. Laurie White, @lauriewrites, responded with this tweet. I want to thank them both for responding because they pointed out some of the thinking behind what people want you to do with their posts, and what they like to do for others’ posts.

On BlogHer, I wrote a post called What Women Do with Twitter. Check the comments. Some commenters couldn’t care less about getting links or retweets from Twitter.

I know there are bloggers with a sharp focus on one thing—like building traffic—but for a small blogger like myself I think the answer is “it depends.” What is the answer for you?

Pew Research Looks at Social Media and Young Adults

Pew Research took a look at teens and young adults and the trends in social media and mobile use among the youthful crowd. The catch word to identify this generation is “millennials,” or the first generation to come of age in the new millennium.

Pew first announced their findings on Twitter at @pewresearch earlier this month. Tweeting your research results is a trend in itself, but according to the Feb. 2010 report from Pew, it probably isn’t something a young adult would do.

A summary of the findings, with a link to the full report, is available on the Pew Research Center site.

mobile phone

Mobile is big. The most interesting findings:

  • Blogging and blog commenting has declined among teens by about 10% since the last study in 2007.
  • Almost 75% of teens and young adults use social networking sites. That’s compared with a mere 40% of adults over 30.
  • Facebook and MySpace run almost neck and neck for popularity among teens and young adults. LinkedIn is a minor blip in this age group.
  • Twitter use is low. The most likely to use Twitter are high school girls, but the numbers there only come to about 13%.
  • Mobile wireless is hot, with about 80% of the adults under 30 being wired into wireless. About 75% of teens and over 90% of young adults have a mobile phone and are using it to conduct an array of online activities.

Pew researcher Amanda Lenhart posted a series of charts showing the trends discovered in this study on Slideshare.

Social Media and Young Adults

Additional Resources:

Cross posted at BlogHer.

Blogger changes its FTP rules

The announcement on the Blogger Buzz blog had the mild mannered title “An Important Note to FTP Users.”

To the bloggers who use Blogger FTP for their blogs, the news was more of a bombshell.

I switched from Blogger by FTP to WordPress several years ago. I wanted tags and categories and stand alone pages, none of which were available from Blogger at that time. BlogCoach just announced that You Can Now Add Pages to Your Blogger Blog! That’s certainly good news and may cheer up some of the people who are having a problem deciding what to do since they can no longer run their Blogger blog by FTP.

Blogger suggests moving your blog to what they call a “custom domain.” They explain what this is in FTP vs. Custom Domains. A custom domain gives you a domain name of your own rather than a blogspot.com URL, even though the blog is run by Blogger and hosted on Google’s servers. To use a custom domain, you first register your domain name. Then, in your Blogger dashboard, go to Settings > Publishing and switch to Custom Domain publishing. Tell them your domain name and you’re set to publish there.

Blogger’s initial announcement of the change promised help in making the transition in the form of a migration tool that will walk you through the migration from a current URL to a Blogger managed URL. A Blogger managed URL can be either a custom domain or a blogspot.com blog. Blogger also set up a blog dedicated to just Blogger FTP Info to help with the transition.

Blogger Widgets wrote a tutorial about Blogger FTP to Custom Domain Migration that is helpful.

Cross posted in a different version at BlogHer.

Learning from the top bloggers

Oh, I know The Bloggess isn’t for everyone. She’s profane and outrageous. She’s offensive in so many ways. She’s also funnier than Robin Williams and extremely successful at blogging.

One of the hints you get when you read tips for being a better blogger is to summarize your posts in a weekly roundup. Another tip is to point out your most popular posts. I do remember to do those things every once in a while. I’m not very organized about it, but I remember once in a while.

The Bloggess writes in more than one place on the web (as I do). So she publishes a weekly summary of “shit-I-was-doing-when-I-wasn’t-here.” This feels like another edict from on high from a successful blogger: tell people about all the other stuff you’ve been doing.

In that spirit, my aim today is remind you off all the stuff-I-do-here-and-there-on-the-web.

  • WaSP InterAct Curriculum. This is a web standards based curriculum produced by a worldwide volunteer group of experts from education, business, and many web related fields. It is freely available for use in education and business. Some courses are available now. More will be available in March. Several members of this group are working on a book.
  • eHow. This how-to site is home to several hundred articles  of mine explaining all sorts of web related things in step by step fashion. I’m approaching a million page views at eHow, which is possibly a greater readership than I have anywhere else.
  • First 50 Words. In a past life, I taught writing. I wrote some books about teaching writing. I embrace a technique called “writing practice” which calls for writing about any topic whatsoever. Most days of the week, I create a writing prompt for writing practice and post it at First 50 Words. I write about the topic and invite readers to write about it as well.
  • BlogHer. I’m one of several Contributing Editors at BlogHer who write about technology and the Internet. I haven’t counted the number of posts I have at BlogHer, but I’m sure the number is in the hundreds now. For purposes of comparison, I’ve posted about 1000 writing prompts at First 50 Words and have over 1300 posts here at Web Teacher.
  • TGB Elder Geek. TGB is Time Goes By. It’s a blog about what it’s really like to get older. There are so many elder bloggers who read Time Goes By that I was asked to write some geeky posts aimed at elders. Those posts aren’t much different from any other basic technical post I write.
  • vdebolt.com. I mostly ignore my home domain. Recently I reworked it to reflect more of what I do now, and pared it down to about three pages of information. First time I’ve revised the material there in years. You can find a few more tidbits about me there, such as presentations I’ve done, books, and links to some stories.

There it is: stuff-I-do-here-and-there-on-the-web. With a tip of the hat to The Bloggess.